Santayana Was So, So Right

[filkertom]

Shmuck.

Comments

[holzman.livejournal.com]

Those who fail to forget what Santayana said about history are doomed to repeat it.

[per_solo]

To be just as quickly followed up with "It seems no one reads Santayana anymore"

[deletesoftware.livejournal.com]

Damn stupid copyright. It only depends on what this particular politician meant and did. Those who fail to forget the natural languages ambiguity are condemned to creating hundreds of stupid euphemisms! …and then the euphemisms become banned from TV etc, too…

[valarltd.livejournal.com]

Le sigh.

Work doesn't make us free. Work makes us tired. Money makes us free. (and work and money bear only a passing relationship)

That politician needs to be bludgeoned with copies of I Never Saw Another Butterfly until he gets a clue.

[umbran.livejournal.com]

Technically, it is wealth that makes us free. And, in terms of thermodynamics, work is required to generate wealth.

Now, of course this doesn't address who is doin' the workin' and who is free...

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

Not to get overly pedantic, but thermodynamics and economics have very little to do with one another. You can do a great deal of work and generate no wealth; you can also do virtually no work and generate arbitrarily large amounts of it (if you want to call letting money sit in an interest-bearing account "generating wealth").

[umbran.livejournal.com]

They have lots to do with each other. Economics is about order, so thermodymanics applies.

To say that work is required to generate wealth does not say all work generates wealth. I don't know where you got the idea, but it wasn't from me. Work is a required, but not a sufficient, condition.

True wealth is real resources that people need or want*. Nothing that people want gets made without work - that's thermodynamics: there is no such thing as a free lunch.

I very speciifcally noted that the people who do the work may not be the ones who end up with the wealth. That's the basis of investment - you provide some initial resources, someone else does the work, and passes some of the resulting wealth back to you. If nobody ever does work, there is no return on your investment, and you get no additional wealth.

* I very specifically differentiated here between wealth and money. Money is an agreed-upon convenience we use to roughly represent wealth. Eventually, money without wealth corrects via inflation of market prices.

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

Economics is about order, so thermodymanics applies.

As I see it, this statement requires additional support and clarification. "Order" is pretty ambiguous. Arguably politics, and sorting algorithms, are also "about order". Does thermodynamics "apply" to them as well? In particular, IMO it's not obviously the case that "work" means the same thing in each of these domains.

In particular, according to your definition, 'wealth' is defined by demand. Prior to the 20th century, uranium was not really a substance whose possession conferred wealth. Today it is, at least under some circumstances. To put it another way, wealth--as you define it--can be created by the simple act of recognizing an application for something that was previously considered valueless; it need not derive from work.

Certainly you can use similar mathematical models to describe both economic and physical processes. This just means that the processes can be analogized at some level of abstraction, not that the underlying forces and interactions which the models describe are necessarily the same.

Work is a required, but not a sufficient, condition.

I didn't intend to suggest that you had said that work was 'sufficient'; my apologies if I conveyed that impression. I would claim that work is neither necessary nor sufficient (see above).

I very specifically differentiated here between wealth and money.

Well, you clearly indicated that you thought that they were not the same thing, but not what you thought wealth was; I appreciate your clarification. :)

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

I'd say that money only confers freedom up to a point: once you have more money than you can actually use (or reasonably save) then it confers power (and let's all chime in on the "with great power comes great responsibility" line). That is: if you have a lot of money, then (it seems to me) then you are responsible for what that money gets used for. (Keeping it in the bank isn't neutral: that gives the bank more power to do things like make loans to people. Keeping it buried in your backyard isn't neutral, either, as that takes the money out of the economy.)

[indyellen.livejournal.com]

Wow, someone else familiar with I Never Saw Another Butterfly...I don't know many people who are.


Carry on...

[valarltd.livejournal.com]

I did forensics in High School. It was my Dramatic Interp cutting my senior year.

"It was good-bye, not work, that made us free. For what is there to fear when you have said good-bye to everyone you love?"

[indyellen.livejournal.com]

I did forensics too, also Dramatic Interp. I wanted to do it, but someone had done it the year before, and my coach advised against it. Instead I did Duet for One. :)

[siliconshaman.livejournal.com]

With the local government work programs around here... sadly that's far too accurate to be funny!

[lets just say that YTS trainees about equate to "emergency reactor shielding"]

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

The thing that bothers me most about this, to be honest, is that the implication is that "if [INSERT NAME OF ORGANIZATION OR PERSON WITH WHOM YOU VIOLENTLY DISAGREE] said X and made it famous, then X can never be used again without promoting OOPWWYVD".

A side note: yes, I'd like to think that each of us would remember all the salient details about significant historical events so that we can recognize when we're barrelling down the same old groove...but (a) there's an awful lot of history to remember--how many of us remember the slogans that Pol Pot's regime used?--and (b) to be honest, I don't see this phrase as really exemplifying the Nazis.

Put it another way: if you used a clever catch-phrase that you'd picked up somewhere as a hook for a song, and then discovered later that you'd got it indirectly from Ann Coulter, what would you do? (Aside from scream in horror, that is. :) )

I have mixed feelings about this particular slogan, but why should the Nazis be permitted to still exert this much control over our expression?

I'm reminded of U2's introduction to their rendition of "Helter Skelter": "Charles Manson stole this song from the Beatles...we're stealing it back."

[unclelumpy.livejournal.com]

Words, by themselves, hold no power,
It is the intent with which they are used that grants them significance

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

Well, the problem (if you want to look at it like that) seems to be that words also derive significance from their interpretation in the minds of others.

For example, Kerry said something like "I actually voted for the $X billion before I voted against it." Arguably what he meant by that is that he voted for it before realizing the harm (as he saw it) that the bill's passing would do, and then changed his vote when another opportunity presented itself. However, that phrase was interpreted by his opponents (and a number of his party's supporters) as an indication of indecisiveness or trying to have it both ways. Regardless of what interpretation you think is most accurate, the point is that you, I, and everyone else each chooses how to interpret what they hear.

The question--and I don't claim that I know the Right Answer for this case or any other--is whether one should avoid saying something because the words could be interpreted in ways that you (or others) don't like.

(Another side note: who's to say that the Nazis are the ones that came up with that slogan in the first place?)

[morpheus0013.livejournal.com]

Ow.

Damn, dude. Seriously.

[hitchkitty.livejournal.com]

...

Now, in all fairness, I don't know that there are all that many ways to express the same concept. And one doesn't necessarily think of the Nazi party when one hears it.

That having been said...oy, what a putz.

[smallship1.livejournal.com]

Hang on. Let's translate this a little differently...

"If you want to be free, you have to do something about it."

Anyone want to argue with that one?

[partiallyclips.livejournal.com]

Um, I forget where I heard this. But I really think it's apt.

Four legs good, two legs bad.

[madrona.livejournal.com]

Monsanto's all drumstick chicken ad campaign!

Animal Farm

[pickledcritter.livejournal.com]

That came from Orwell's other classic, Animal Farm...and WHY did you have to bring back memories of the horror that was my Freshman English - a year in which we, as a class, were forced to listen to Evita, then write a paper on it?? ;)

Re: Animal Farm

[partiallyclips.livejournal.com]

You should really change the oil in your sarcasm detector every 3000 posts or so. Keeps it running smoothly.

Re: Animal Farm

[pickledcritter.livejournal.com]

sorry :) - As noted above, being educated in a LaSallian (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lasallian) Catholic high school caused much scarring, so my detector suffered a momentary brown out. :)